Natsu and Lucy have the Aquarius Talk
by hashtagartistlife
Summary: Losing your water spirit is tough when you're fighting in the pouring rain and your only companion is a stupid fire mage. [Nalu]


**Written for FT angst week 2015, day 3. The prompt was 'broken (promises/hearted)'. Takes place in chapter 424, between when Natsu catches a collapsing Juvia at the front of the Rainfall Village and when Juvia wakes up and provides an explanation for Gray's absence. I think in-world, the time between the two events was only supposed to be like five minutes or so, but I'm going to use creative license to stretch that out to, like, five hours. Basically, Natsu catches Juvia, they take her into the house and lay her in a bed, and Wendy and Happy volunteer to look after Juvia while Natsu and Lucy go out to find dinner for them all, which is when this fic takes place. Natsu and Lucy return to the village, where Juvia then wakes up and manages to explain the situation.**

* * *

 **Natsu And Lucy Have The Aquarius Talk**

by _hashtagartistlife_

They had only wanted some fish for dinner.

"LUCY!" Natsu yelled, before a tentacle grabbed him and dunked him underwater again. His flames went out with a sad _hiss_ and Lucy saw him go limp, clutching at the pink appendage wrapped around him for dear life. Ah. So his motion sickness was still in full force, it seemed. Wind buffeted rain into her eyes, and Lucy cracked her whip frustratedly.

"Damn octopus, let Natsu _go_!" she screamed at the monstrous creature before them that only just qualified for the classification of _octopus_ by dint of its eight limbs thrashing about in the river. Flinging her arm back, she retired Taurus and called forth Cancer, in the hopes that his constitution might be better suited for the damp environment.

"Need another haircut so soon, Luc–"

"Learn to read the damn situation!" Lucy said, and Cancer put his salon tools away sheepishly. "You're a crab, you can fight in the water, right?"

"Are you kidding me, Lucy? I'm a hairdresser. Humidity is killer for the hair," he explained. "Whoa, watch it!"

A tentacle lunged at them, and Lucy missed it by centimetres as Cancer threw himself at her and they fell backwards. She rolled out from underneath him and stood up, brandishing her whip.

"Are you joking?! You're a CRAB and you can't do watery environments?!" she screeched, desperately searching through her bundle of keys for anything that might give her an advantage. Pisces. If only she had the key to Pisces! Damn it, why hadn't she accepted Yukino's offer when she made it?

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING, LUCY?!" Natsu bellowed as he emerged from the river again, spitting seaweed from his mouth, "WE GOTTA GET BACK TO JUVIA, IT'S ONLY WENDY AND HAPPY THERE AND–"

"I'M TRYING, YOU MORON!" Lucy shrieked, "IT'S TOO DAMN WET FOR ANY OF MY STELLAR SPIRITS TO BE EFFECTIVE–"

"USE AQUARIUS!" Natsu hollered at her just as he disappeared underwater again, almost unconscious from the combination of drowning and motion sickness, and Lucy felt his sentence like a punch to the gut.

"Open! Door to the white lamb - Aries!" she yelled instead, and Aries materialised in front of her in a fighting stance.

"Can you dry all this water around us with your wool?" Lucy asked desperately, and Aries inclined her head. In an instant, they were surrounded by an ever-growing pile of pink wool, effectively immobilising the octopus and shielding them from the rain.

"Hey - it's stopped moving! It's dry again!" Natsu said somewhere from inside the pink haze, and a fireball ripped through the wool in the next second, incinerating the octopus and filling the air with the smell of burning fibre. Aries wrinkled her nose.

"Thank you, Aries," Lucy sighed in relief, before dismissing her stellar spirits. She turned to face a grinning Natsu, re-coiling her whip tiredly.

"Good strategy, Luce," he said, "though I don't know why you didn't just go with Aquarius from the start, would have saved us a lot of time–"

There it was again, that punch to the gut. It had been a year since it happened, but losing friends didn't get any easier with time. Lucy's hands trembled as she reattached her whip to her belt.

"– on second thoughts, she's not always happiest to see you, is she, I suppose we would've gotten swept away as well–"

He still didn't know, did he? None of them knew. They had all been apart for a year and she hadn't kept in touch with any of them, and it wasn't like the death of a friend (or close enough, really) was something you brought up in casual conversation. But for the love of _god_ , did he have to prattle on about it like that? Why couldn't he just _drop_ it?

"– but then again, maybe you've finally learned to get along with her, you did say you've been training, right–"

"–Stop," she said, and Natsu petered out mid-sentence, no doubt confused by her suddenly hostile demeanour.

"Lucy? Are you ok? Stop what?"

"Stop mentioning Aquarius," she said, and to her abject humiliation, she found her eyes filling with tears. "You don't have any right to say her name. You weren't the one she had the contract with, you don't get to decide when and how I call her out–"

"–had?" Natsu said quietly, and Lucy absolutely _hated_ how he had picked up on the one word in her rant she wished he wouldn't notice. "Luce, what happened–"

"SHE'S GONE!" Lucy screamed, and the small clearing echoed with the sound of her anguish. "She's gone, she sacrificed herself a year ago so I could summon the Celestial Spirit King, I can't see her any more, and you don't _care-_ -"

"–Lucy–"

"–because if you had you never would have _left me_ , Natsu, for a whole year, and you didn't even ask me how I was doing, how I coped with losing my whole family in the span of a few days, how I had to pick myself up from the ground when the guild disbanded while you were off with Happy doing god knows what–"

"–Lucy, I–"

"– we were a _team!_ " Lucy shouted, and her tears spilled over, leaving glistening trails down her cheeks. "We were a team, we were supposed to get stronger together, _why didn't you take me with you?_ "

The rain was still falling. The droplets mingled with the tears on her face, and Lucy broke down completely, for once allowing the storm inside her to show outside.

"Do– you have any– _idea_ – how lonely I was?" she sobbed, and something deep within Lucy recognised the truth of her words. She had been _so_ lonely. It had been crippling some days, that loneliness, so crushing that she could barely muster the strength to get out of bed. She had pushed through it, ignored it, had told herself to stop being lazy – had not wanted to put a name to the suffocating emotion that pervaded ever fibre of her being for fear that if she named it, she would never be able to shrug it off. But oh, she had been _so lonely_.

"Lucy…" Natsu began hesitantly, before Lucy felt a light touch on her shoulder. He was as warm as an open flame, as usual, and Lucy sobbed _harder_.

"Luce… I… I'm sorry," he said, and the words hung between them, thick and heavy and _woefully inadequate_ to make up for the year of lost time between them.

How had it come to this? How could just a year fill the space between them with so much misery? She had been glad to see Natsu and Happy once more, it was true, but something fundamental in their dynamic had _changed_ and she wasn't sure if it would ever go back to the way it was.

 _Broken._

So many things broken between them and unmentioned, broken keys, broken contracts, broken promises, broken trust.

Broken _hearts_.

Lucy met Natsu's eyes in the rain, and saw her expression mirrored in them.

Guarded. Cautious. A world of pain.

… a faint possibility of _hope_.

"I'm sorry, Lucy. I had my reasons for leaving, and if I had to do it again– I would. To protect you, to protect our guild. But I never expected you to be in this much _pain_. I thought the guild would have been there to support you. Lucy, I'm _sorry_."

Lucy just stared and stared, unheeding of the rain soaking through her hair and down her spine. All she could see was Natsu, his blazingly sincere eyes, his pink hair damp and falling into a fringe, the red guildmark on his shoulder burning like a beacon of fire in the night.

Unbidden, she remembered that he had lost someone in the war, too.

"But I'm going to do my best to try and make it right, Lucy. We're going to bring Fairy Tail back. I promised you, didn't I? And a promise you make to a Celestial Spirit mage is binding. I'm bringing Fairy Tail _back_."

He held out his hand, palm up, and Lucy couldn't shake off the feeling of deja vu, the flashback to when they had first met, when he had offered his hand in a similar promise to bring her to Fairy Tail.

She had trusted him then, took his hand without hesitation. Could the broken Lucy Heartfilia of now do the same?

She looked back up at him again, saw the fire flickering in his eyes. She looked down at her hand, the guildmark inked there, remembered future Lucy's expression as she requested to see her guildmark one last time. She closed her eyes, and she could see Natsu's face straight after Tartaros, caked with dirt and grime and streaked with blood. _He was broken too._

Lucy opened her eyes. They may be broken, but she refused to let them go on unfixed any longer.

"I'll hold you to that."

Lucy Heartfilia took Natsu Dragneel's hand.


End file.
